MOBILE, Ala. – Here is what Jim DeMint concluded after serving 14 years in the U.S. House and Senate: Washington is irreparably broken.

DeMint, a Republican from Greenville, S.C., resigned his Senate seat in January, with four years remaining in his second term. He took a job running the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, saying the move would better position him to fight the federal government.

“I wasn’t going to run again,” DeMint said during an interview Wednesday in Mobile. “So I had to decide if I wanted to spend my last four years doing what I had been doing – which was getting up each day and trying to figure out how to stop bad legislation – or take the opportunity at Heritage to try and revitalize the conservative movement.”

He chose the latter, and hasn’t stopped moving since. Mobile was the 25th city he’d visited since taking the new job. The tour is part of his strategy to build a national, grass-roots network of conservatives that will force change on Washington.

“The reason I made the change is, it just became abundantly clear to me that we cannot win this battle from Washington, D.C.,” said DeMint, who was in Mobile as the keynote speaker at a private fundraiser for the Alabama Policy Institute. “I can promise you from being there: The people in Washington are simply not going to solve our problems. They are the problems.”

Even the good ones, he said, naming U.S. Sens. Jeff Sessions, R-Mobile, and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, as two of the leading conservative lights.

“The problem is they’re stuck in a system that is no longer working,” DeMint said.

The perch at Heritage gives DeMint a broader base and deeper resources to drive his message of states’ rights and smaller government.

Specifically, he’s pushing a plan that he calls “competitive federalism,” which would shift major policy issues to the states and leave Congress to focus on the budget.

“The idea is to recognize that our Constitution limits what we should do in Washington, but it allows states a lot of flexibility to do things a different way,” he said. “To encourage Alabama and the other states to compete for the best business environment, the best tax code, the best education system.”

“I can promise you from being there: The people in Washington are simply not going to solve our problems. They are the problems.” – Jim DeMint

It’s a plan that he says can unify conservatives now divided over immigration, education policy, gun laws and other issues.

“We push more of those things back to the states and communities, where the people can manage them more effectively,” he said. “And that will enable the federal government to balance the budget and hopefully avoid the bankruptcy that our nation is heading for right now.”

DeMint has long been a champion of the Tea Party, and his game plan is closely aligned with the conservative movement. His approach has rankled many establishment Republicans – with good reason, according to DeMint.

DeMint said the GOP’s success in the 2010 election cycle, when Republicans captured 63 seats in the House and delivered punishing defeats to Democrats in state elections from coast to coast, had nothing to do with the national Republican Party.

“It had everything to do with people who were just frustrated with the spending, the borrowing, the bailouts and Obamacare. And they got involved, in many cases for the first time in their lives,” said DeMint. “They were independents. They were recovering liberals. They were regular people who didn’t care much about either party. But they cared about their country.”

In 2012, he said, “the Republican Party kind of took things back, and decided to run elections the old way.” The party’s campaign battle plan, he said, was hatched by establishment Republicans in Washington and relied heavily on expensive TV advertising.

“We lost. And we lost big – not because we didn’t have the right ideas. We lost because we did not run a campaign that connected with the people,” he said. “It was very negative about the other guy. There was nothing that was really inspiring about those conservative principles of freedom that really get people up on their feet.”

DeMint said his mission is to inspire conservatives to take back control of their government. The irony, he said, is that he had to leave Washington to accomplish it.

“I have a lot more power to change things outside of Congress than I ever did while I was in it,” he said.

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